Tom's Midnight Garden (18 page)

F
or the rest of Tuesday night Tom lay in bed, at first thinking, and then, at last, dreaming—but of the same things, and of other things that floated up from the bottom of his mind and joined them. He dreamed that it was his last night here. He went downstairs to go into the garden; but he found that the angel had come down from the clock-face and—grown to giant-size—barred the way with a flaming sword. Yet Tom would not be withstood, so at last the angel stepped aside from the doorway. When Tom looked through it, he saw that the garden had gone, and there was only a paved yard with dustbins, and in the middle stood old, old Mrs Bartholomew angrily saying: ‘Who has been meddling with the Time of my grandfather clock?’ Then Tom woke; and at once all the strange dream-things sank back again to the bottom of his mind and into it rushed the ideas and questions and incomplete pieces of reasoning from his waking hours.

Tom thought again: Time no longer—the angel on the grandfather clock had sworn it. But if Time is ever to end, that means that, here and now, Time itself is only a temporary thing. It can be dispensed with perhaps; or, rather, it can be dodged. Tom himself might be able to dodge behind Time’s back and have the Past—that is, Hatty’s Present and the garden—here, now and for ever. To manage that, of course, he must understand the workings of Time.

‘What is Time?’ Tom asked Aunt Gwen, when she brought him his early cup of tea; and his aunt, not believing she had heard him aright, replied that it was nearly seven o’clock.

‘What is Time—I mean, how does Time
work
?’ Tom asked his uncle at breakfast. According to him, however, there was not one certain answer; people just had theories.

‘Of course,’ said Uncle Alan, ‘it used to be thought …’ and Tom listened attentively, and sometimes he seemed to understand, and then, sometimes he was sure he didn’t. ‘But modern theories of Time,’ said Uncle Alan, ‘the
most
modern theories …’ and Tom began wondering if theories went in and out of fashion, like ladies’ dresses, and then suddenly knew that he couldn’t be attending, and wrenched his mind back, and thought again that he was understanding, and then again was sure he wasn’t, and experienced a great depression.

‘I’ve heard a theory, too,’ said Tom, while his uncle paused to drink some tea. ‘I know an angel—I know
of
an angel who said that, in the end, there would be Time no longer.’

‘An angel!’ His uncle’s shout was so explosive that a great deal of tea slopped down his tie, and he was made even angrier to have to mop it up. ‘What on earth have angels to do with scientific theories?’ Tom trembled, and dared not explain that this was more than a theory: it was a blazing, angelic certitude.

Uncle Alan was saying, in an angry voice, that he didn’t want any more breakfast. He went from the house, slamming the front door after him, and ten minutes early for work.

As soon as he had gone, Aunt Gwen said reproachfully to Tom: ‘Tom, I wish you wouldn’t.’

‘Well,’ said Tom, ‘I didn’t know he felt like that about angels, did I?’

‘Your uncle is as reverent as anyone about angels, in their proper place,’ said Aunt Gwen; ‘but it’s very bad for him to be crossed at breakfast-time. His nerves are always a little on edge so early in the morning, and before we know where we are he has lost his temper, and then he rushes over his breakfast or leaves half of it. It all leads to indigestion.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Tom. Certainly his aunt had an insight into Truth, although it was a different kind from his uncle’s.

That evening, as soon as Alan Kitson came in, his wife took him aside to talk to him. At first he was inclined to talk too, and at a high pitch; but towards the end he was saying nothing; and at the very end there was a pause and then he said, ‘Perhaps you are right: I ought to.’

At supper, when he saw Tom, he said, ‘Tom, I apologize,’ so majestically that Tom felt quite crushed beneath it.

Tom supposed that the subject of Time would be left to rest; but his uncle was now determined to make full amends for the morning. After supper he got out pencil and paper and began to draw diagrams for Tom. ‘Imagine, Tom, that this is a point in Time …’ Later he asked Tom to imagine a painter standing in a landscape and painting it, and a second painter coming behind him and painting the same landscape with the first painter’s picture of the landscape in it, and yet a third painter coming up and painting the same landscape with the first painter’s picture of the landscape and with the second painter’s picture of the first painter’s picture of the landscape, and then a fourth painter … ‘I hope that parallel has made things clearer to you, Tom,’ said his uncle. ‘Or look at it another way. Suppose …’ Tom’s face was beginning to go stiff all over with the expression of understanding he was putting on it; and really, by now, he wanted just to cry, like a baby, because he understood nothing, and yet it was all so important to him.

Then, suddenly, Uncle Alan was mentioning Rip van Winkle. ‘For instance,’ he said, ‘think of Rip van Winkle—or no, perhaps that’s not very illuminating. No, think, for instance, of a new point in Time which we’ll call A.’

But Uncle Alan was too late: Tom had already begun thinking of Rip van Winkle, because he was the first person Uncle Alan had mentioned that Tom really knew anything about; indeed, Tom knew all about him. Rip van Winkle had gone out hunting one day in the North American mountains, and had fallen asleep in an enchanted place. It seemed to him that the time he spent sleeping there was only a night; but, when he woke up and went down the mountain-side to his family, he found that twenty years had gone by.

Now, thought Tom, wasn’t he himself rather like Rip van Winkle in reverse, so to speak? Instead of going forward for twenty years, Tom went back a hundred and more, to Hatty’s lifetime. He did not always go back to exactly the same Time, every night; nor did he take Time in its usual order. The fir-tree, for instance: he had seen it standing, fallen and then standing again—it was still standing last night. He had seen Hatty as a girl of his own age, then as a much younger one, and recently as a girl who—although Tom would not yet fully admit it—was outgrowing him altogether. In flashes, Tom had seen Hatty’s Time—the garden’s Time—covering what must be about ten years, while his own Time achieved only the weeks of a summer holiday.

‘You might say,’ Tom said slowly, coming into the conversation again without having been listening to it, ‘You might say that different people have different times, although of course, they’re really all bits of the same big Time.’

‘Well,’ said his uncle, ‘one could say more accurately—’

Tom went straight on. ‘So that I might be able, for some reason, to step back into someone else’s Time, in the Past; or, if you like’—he saw it all, suddenly and for the first time, from Hatty’s point of view—‘she might step forward into my Time, which would seem the Future to her, although to me it seems the Present.’

‘It would be much clearer, Tom,’ said his uncle, ‘to go back to this Point A—’

But Tom was going on. ‘Whichever way it is, she would be no more a ghost from the Past than I would be a ghost from the Future. We’re neither of us ghosts; and the garden isn’t either. That settles that.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Uncle Alan said irritably. ‘Gardens? And what settles what? We’re talking of possibilities—theories.’

‘But,’ said Tom, ‘suppose someone really had stepped out of one Time into another—just like that—then that would be proof.’

‘Proof!’
cried Uncle Alan; and for a moment Tom thought he was going to be angry again, but he controlled himself. ‘I have been able to explain to you very little, Tom, if I have not even conveyed to you that proof—in matters of Time Theory—
Proof
… !’ Apparently, about Time, as about some master-criminal, you could prove nothing.

Tom did not mind. He had settled some things to his own satisfaction. Starting from what the angel had revealed to him, he had worked out something useful about the nature of Time. At least, he did not quite see yet how it would be useful, but he had a warm, excited feeling in his mind that seemed to him to mean that he was on the verge of finding—round and perfect—the solution of his problem.

That Wednesday night Tom went down to the garden in a new frame of mind. The season was still winter; but Tom looked round about him sharply, thinking, ‘I dare-say, but is this the
same
winter? Is this a different bit of Hatty’s Time that I have come into? If so, is it an earlier bit or a later bit?’

This question was answered for him when, walking round the garden, he came to the hedge: a gateway had been made in it, to lead into the meadow. The thing had certainly not been there on Tom’s last visit, or he would have noticed it at once. The gate had been put in since then, and had had time to grow old-looking, and shabby.

The gravel-path under Tom’s feet was crackly with frost as he went towards the gate; and when he leaned over it and looked across what in summer he had known as low-lying grazing ground, he saw one expanse of ice. On the far side of the meadow, where the ice was best, skaters were moving, skimming the surface, calling to each other, laughing.

Tom felt left out of the fun. He was sure that this was one of the parties of friends into which James had said he would draw Hatty. One could guess which among the skating-party might be Hatty herself: a girl who was among all the others at one moment, and then, at the next, would be speeding alone over the ice. A habit of solitude in early childhood is not easily broken. Indeed, it may prove lifelong.

Now the young men among the skaters were pulling curved branches off the pollarded willow-trees, to make sticks for a practice game of bandy, or ice-hockey; a stone was to be the ball. The girls gathered to watch, laughing and talking.

The solitary skater had swerved away from them, and now came rushing across the ice on her skates—right across the meadow towards the hedge. Hatty—for it
was
Hatty—had seen Tom. ‘Or at least, I saw something and I thought it might be you.’ She peered doubtfully at Tom, even as she was gliding up on her last, long stroke.

She was opening the garden gate. ‘I’m so glad it
is
you, Tom! I miss you sometimes, even now—in spite of the Chapman girls being good fun, and Barty and the others—in spite of the skating—Oh, Tom, skating! I feel as if I could go from here to the end of the world, if all the world were ice! I feel as free as a bird—as I’ve never felt before! I want to go so far—so far!’

She was urging him on to the ice now, nor was Tom unwilling. ‘Come on, Tom, do!’ He felt the smoothness of the ice beneath his one bare foot, and the very slightest spring and sway of it, like a ballroom floor, under Hatty’s weight. As though the ice made an enchantment, he forgot the problem of Time he had to think of—forgot that he had anything to think of. Hatty swooped away from him, and he swooped after her on a more glorious iceslide than he and Peter had ever found in the streets at home; but his sliding ended sooner than Hatty’s skating, and his action was earthbound, whilst hers was like a strong bird’s.

‘Tom,’ Hatty called softly to him, from over the ice, but speeding nearer, passing him with a rush of air, ‘why haven’t you skates?’

‘Oh, why haven’t I skates?’ Tom repeated in anguish, for all the skates he had ever used had been hired ones on a town ice-rink; and his uncle and aunt would not have skates, he was sure; and they would think it very odd if he wanted to buy skates in a great hurry in the middle of summer.

Then, like a brilliant, icy light, came an idea into Tom’s head—one of the most daring ideas he had ever had.

With outspread arms he begged Hatty to stop skating and listen to him; and she did. ‘Hatty, where do you keep your skates, when you’re not using them, I mean?’

‘In the boot cupboard in the hall. At the end of the winter, I oil the straps and grease the blades and wrap the skates up in paper, and they go on to the top shelf of the cupboard.’

There were no skates in the hall-cupboard in the daytime, Tom knew—nothing on the shelves but the things that the ginger-bearded tenant used for the care of his car. If Hatty had kept her skates there, then, of course, when the Melbournes had all died or moved house, long ago, her skates would have been turned out of the cupboard, perhaps to be sold, or given or thrown away. Anyway, they would have been lost to him.

Before Hatty had finished explaining about the boot cupboard, Tom had decided that it was quite the wrong place for her to keep her skates: she needed somewhere dry and safe, of course, but above all somewhere secret.

‘Hatty, will you promise me something?’

‘What?’

‘Will you promise first?’

‘I can’t promise anything that’s wrong or dangerous.’

‘It isn’t either. I only want you to promise first, because otherwise, when you hear what it is, you might just say it was too silly—and it isn’t—really it isn’t.’

‘Well, tell me, and then I’ll promise if I possibly can.’

Tom had to be satisfied with this, so he said, ‘Well, I only want you to keep your skates, always, when you’re not using them, in that secret place you showed me in your bedroom cupboard, under the floorboards.’

‘There!’
said Hatty, as though it were a very long time since she had needed to think of that place. ‘But that
is
silly—why ever should I keep them there?’

‘Promise!’ cried Tom. ‘It only seems silly; but there’s no harm in it. Promise. It’s nothing to you.’

‘What is it to you?’ Hatty asked, bewildered.

‘It’s too long to tell you now; but promise—promise on your honour—always to keep your skates there, when you’re not skating—in that secret place. It still is secret, isn’t it?’ he added with sudden fear.

‘The only person I ever told was you,’ said Hatty. ‘But, Tom—’

‘Promise on your honour, as you said you would if you could,’ Tom insisted, and saw that he was winning.

‘I don’t understand, but—all right, I promise—I promise on my honour.’

Tom had perfect faith in her; he turned at once and slid back to the gate, towards the house.